


This Misery Will Suffice

by livwrites



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Developing Relationship, Domestic Violence, F/M, Post-War, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 18:29:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12799860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livwrites/pseuds/livwrites
Summary: Astoria Greengrass had always been afraid of the night.





	This Misery Will Suffice

Astoria Greengrass had always been afraid of the night.

When she was a child, it had been nothing more than a simple fear; a phobia of the dark; a worry that the bogeyman was going to come and get her. 

As she grew older it morphed into something entirely rational; her fear of the night was no longer something silly. 

The Greengrass family had never been a happy one; their mother was a witch with a venomous tongue who stalked through the mansion looking for the slightest possible thing to complain about. Their father was a drunkard who imbibed multiple bottles of wine before dinner and did his best to make their lives a living hell.

Night was when Astoria and Daphne were forced to stay home; night was when they took refuge wherever they could find it. Under one of their beds, in a corner, anywhere that would keep them out of range of their parents and the never-ending war that was constantly raging after the supper dishes had been cleared away.

They had been told that they were not allowed to go out at night because it was dangerous and they might get hurt, a maxim that overlooked the psychological hurt that was being inflicted on the two of them.

By the time Astoria received her Hogwarts letter she was more than ready to leave. To be at Hogwarts would offer her a chance at being a child, something that she had missed out on. 

But it turned out that being at Hogwarts wasn't the chance at innocence that she had hoped for, as the world was darkening around her. 

At the end of her first year, Astoria returned home from Hogwarts to find that nothing had changed regarding her parents. If anything, they had gotten worse. Much worse. The arguments no longer waited until after dinner ended to commence; they began at the table, with Daphne and Astoria shooting each other horrified looks across the table as their parents screamed at each other. 

In hindsight, Astoria was surprised that she lasted as long as she did; she did not break down until the summer before fifth year. It was then that one night she got up in the middle of dinner and stormed off, unable to handle the scene going on in front of her. Stomping into her room and slamming the door, she hit the ground and curled up into a ball, sobs ripping through her chest.

It was then that Astoria realized that she couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't take it. 

Ten minutes later she was running through the front door, her bag across her back and her wand in her hand as her parents screamed at her to come back.

That was the beginning of the period of her life when the night became a terror in itself. It was that summer that Voldemort took over the Ministry. Her family had never been supporters of him; her parents had been too busy terrorizing their children to be interested in doing the same to other people. 

She had, of course, gone back to Hogwarts - there had been nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Besides, Voldemort's new regime had made attendance mandatory.

The castle was dramatically changed. Astoria wasn't sure which was scarier: the day, when the Carrows were out trying to find someone to make an example of, or the night, when her fears and nightmares emerged. 

When Voldemort was finally defeated, many of her peers proclaimed that this was the start of a better life, and that they could finally live without fear or prejudice. Astoria didn’t understand them. Her fears were still out. The night was still a thing to be terrified of. And she doubted that it would ever change.

Even though peace, freedom, and equality had been declared, Astoria behaved as though she was still under siege in the purgatory that Hogwarts had been during her past year. She lived in her flat, the curtains drawn, the windows shuttered, and only went out went she absolutely had to.

Three months after the fall of Voldemort, Astoria had not come out of her cage. It was a cage she had built for her own protection, but it was still a cage. She only began to cautiously and reluctantly emerge when Daphne visited her to check up on her and was horrified by the squalor that she found in her sister’s apartment. 

Her sister basically dragged her to a support group for those who had been profoundly affected by the war. Having survived her parents herself, Daphne knew that a lot of Astoria’s struggles lay there and not in Voldemort, but she decided that it couldn’t possibly hurt. 

It did help. Eventually, of course, because Astoria couldn’t bring herself to open up. She refused to trust, refused to confide her darkness to anyone else. In her opinion, no one else should have to bear that pain. The support group, though, made her realize that she wasn’t alone, that there were other people struggling, and that people other than her sister cared about her. 

It was a big shock to her when she realized that many of those people who cared about her - who asked her how she was doing, offered support, and generally promised to be there for her, no matter how many times she brushed them off because she didn’t trust herself to open up - were people who had been on the other side of the war. Gryffindors. Hufflepuffs. Ravenclaws. There was, of course, the odd Slytherin at the group, most those who had either joined the resistance movement at Hogwarts or who were suffering in other ways. Astoria tended to drift to them out of comfort; she was familiar with the Slytherins and knew most of them from when she was at Hogwarts. 

That was how she became comfortable with Draco Malfoy. She hadn’t really talked to him at Hogwarts - she had been quiet and he had been busy being a twit - but he was in Daphne’s year and she’d seen him a few times. 

One night, after the group meeting, he approached her and asked her if she wanted to join him in the pub later for a drink. She agreed, and was grateful for the quiet companionship that ensued: no questions asked, just the two of them sitting at the same table, drowning their sorrows in Firewhiskey. Of course, she regretted it the next morning, but joined him again after the next meeting anyways.

It wasn’t long before they graduated from sharing a bottle to sharing a bed, each holding on to the other as a lifeline. Shudders and nightmares, they discovered, were easier to get over when you had someone with you who knew exactly what you were going through. 

It was, Astoria discovered, much harder to be afraid of the night when there was someone to brave it with you. And when she discovered she was pregnant, she vowed that her child would grow to love the night, not be terrified of it.


End file.
